User Reviews

Overall Rating:

Value Rating:

Submitted by
thaistith
a AudioPhile

Date Reviewed: December 22, 2010

Bottom Line:

I have used this player for over 6yrs. I have had to replace lost lines of information after playing a selection.
I have used the disc explorer to help locate a dvd. The Explorer will locate from three files....numeric, alphabetic or from categories. I have used the picture saved... to the folder....most beneficial with 52" veiwing. Sound and picture quality are superb. I used a mini keyboard to help simplify data input. I've set mine to turn itself off after a period of inactivity. Will play all except unfinalized disc. Connected to a Sony HT system. This player is quiet and easy to use.

Thanks to the dire warnings in reviews like these, I purchased this item with low expectations. I chose a local retailer instead of an online one because I knew I might want to return it. Got a floor model for $345, so I was satisfied with the price.

One reviewer mentioned that he avoided the Disc Explorer entirely by typing up a list and accessing discs by disc number only. I took his advice, and after a cursory look at the Disc Explorer I haven't used it since. Sony screwed up here, but the rest of the player is great.

(It's inexplicable why Sony designed the Disc Explorer the way they did. It shows only 5 titles at a time, you can't page down and it doesn't load titles automatically from most discs. It's really terrible. WTF, Sony?)

If the remote had a jog dial so I could dial up a disc number, I'd be in heaven. As it is, I use the
+/- keys or press "Folder", then type in the disc number, enter, enter. This works fine. I'm happy with the disc-loading speed.

What I'm most thrilled with is that it plays all my DVD+R home movies perfectly. Whew. Didn't know whether they'd play when I bought it. Having 20 years of my life on deck changes everything. I can go to my kids' birthdays, Christmas of any year or specific vacation memories in seconds. Without a player like this, most home video lies unwatched and even if you pop a tape in, you can't locate anything quickly. With everything transferred to DVD and loaded in a jukebox, I can finally really use my home movies. Same with my complete Monty Python and Seinfeld sets. If you want to put on The Argument Sketch or The Contest, you can go right to it. Oh, and children are incapable of putting DVDs back in their cases. Problem solved.

One nightmare I read about but didn't have was scratched discs. My player is fine in this regard.

My wife asked my why I bought it if it had so many annoying problems. Here's the deal:

1. This player costs $200 less than the Pioneer.
2. This player is progressive scan.
3. The Pioneer is much older.
4. It does what it's supposed to do.

I can't comment on the picture or audio quality since I'm not a videophile or audiophile anymore. I have the thing plugged directly into a 27" tv, not even stereo. But I'm sure if I get a plasma tv and hook it into a surround system it'll be awesome.

My wife is happy it plays CDs. She rarely listened to CDs before because it was too much trouble to find them and put them on the player. Now, she can just dial up (on the player) what she wants and press Play.

I wish I had spent the time reading reviews, instead of months dreaming and waiting for my tax refund to arrive.

The engineers who designed the disc management interface, I am positive, never tried it in operation. It's the most unintuitive design ive ever seen. Ask yourself this: if you own 400 DVDs (and want them all in one player), do you want to only see 5 of them at a time? If you own enough dvds to justify a 400 disc changer, then the probabability of that person owning a 32" or larger tv is also quit high, therefore sacrificing all the unused space for simple movie titles and getting about 20 per screen would seem a logical choice.

Once you have all your movies programed in, scrolling your 5 movies at a time is such a time waster. When you click down one movie, it has to redraw all the previous screenshots for each movie.

Another gripe of mine, is that movies are not selectable (by name) outside the teeth pulling disc explorer. I have a sony 300 disc cd changer (that I bought at the same time as my dvd changer) that once the names of discs are programmed in, the jog dial scrolls the names on the front panel as fast as I can turn the dial. This is by far the easiest way to quickly find what you want to hear. The title of the movie is only visible on the units front screen once the movie is being played, and then only if you hit a button to make it appear for a moment. Worthless.

I seriously can stand in front of my entire libraries shelf and pic a movie and insert it into a single disc player, faster than you can search and select a movie in this unintuitive machine.

Tomorrow im going to make a giant text file of the movies in the machine corresponding to what slot, and print it and tack it to the wall next to my DVPCX985V. Reading them off the wall to find the movie appears to be a better (or at least, more useful) technology than what i just paid $400 for.